** FILE ** Michigan Appeals Court Judge Henry Saad is shown in this undated handout photo. A Senate committee failed to reach a compromise Thursday, June 3, 2004, that would have ended a lengthy standoff between Republicans and Democrats on whether to recommend Judge Saad be considered for a federal appeals court seat. (AP Photo/Michigan Appeals Court, file) / AP

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Detroit Free Press columnist

This much is clear: If Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Henry Saad had publicly endorsed Mitt Romney or Pete Hoekstra in 2012, he’d be in deep doo-doo with the state’s Judicial Tenure Commission.

The Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct — a list of ethical dos and don’ts that governs the state’s 600 or so judges, including Saad — specifically prohibits sitting judges from endorsing any candidate for non-judicial office. Violating the code can earn an offending judge penalties ranging from censure to expulsion from judicial office.

So when Saad wanted to express his support for Romney, Hoekstra and an assortment of other GOP candidates and causes on the ballot in 2012, he did so discreetly, by writing checks to their campaigns or to Republican organizations that supported them.

A lot of checks.

In a report posted online this week on the Center for Michigan’s Bridge magazine, my former Free Press colleague David Ashenfelter revealed that Saad, who has sat on Michigan’s second-highest court since his appointment by then-Gov. John Engler in 1994, donated an eye-popping $80,800 — more than half his $151,441 salary — to Republican candidates and causes last year.

A database compiled by the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation lists Saad and his wife, the daughter of Letica Corp. founder Ilija Letica, among “the 1% of the 1%” — an elite group of 31,385 donors who accounted for more than one-fourth of all disclosed political contributions in 2012.

According to OpenSecrets.org, another campaign finance website, Saad contributed $30,800 to the Republican National Committee; $5,000 each to Republicans Romney and Hoekstra — who waged an unsuccessful campaign to unseat U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow — and $10,000 each to Republican Party organizations in Idaho, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Vermont.

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Saad’s generosity earned him a 91st-place ranking among the 619 Michiganders who made the Sunlight Foundation’s 1% of the 1% list. Saad’s wife, Mara Letica Saad, who donated another $110,800 to GOP candidates and organizations, was the state’s 42nd-most generous donor

In a phone conversation Tuesday afternoon, Saad, who has also taught classes in legal ethics at the Wayne State University Law School, agreed that judges are barred from endorsing candidates but insisted that nothing in Michigan’s Code of Judicial Conduct bars them from donating to a partisan candidate’s campaign.

Still, I asked him, doesn’t a judge invite even greater doubts about his impartiality when he sends partisan candidates tens of thousands of dollars?

“There’s a big difference” between endorsing a candidate and exercising a judge’s constitutional right to contribute, Saad insisted. But when I asked him to explain the nature of that difference, he demurred.

“The complexities of constitutional law and judicial ethics, which I’ve taught for many years, don’t lend themselves to easy answers and 30-second sound bites,” he said.

I always feel a little silly acting scandalized when judges reveal their true partisan colors — a little like Claude Rains when he professed himself “shocked — shocked!” to discover that gambling was flourishing in the casino he regularly patronized in “Casablanca.”

The tension between the ideal of judicial nonpartisanship and the real world in which judges promote, bankroll and consistently rule in favor of the parties and politicians that engineered their appointments was baked into Michigan’s state constitution half a century ago, when its framers decreed that nonpartisan candidates for the state’s highest court would be nominated by the parties themselves. So when a fellow as articulate as Saad goes all mealy-mouthed trying to explain why a glaring act of partisanship does nothing to compromise the appearance of judicial impartiality, he’s only upholding the hypocrisy sanctioned by Michigan law.

Reasonable people should regard Saad’s political generosity with at least the same suspicion that baseball fans would feel if they learned that the umpire presiding over a baseball game had bet $500 on the home team.

But don’t expect Saad’s peers on the Judicial Tenure Commission to get all huffy about it; they live in the real world, too, and they know that in Michigan no judge ever got ahead by embarrassing his party or one of its biggest donors — even when it’s the guy in the courtroom down the hall.